We all bought the gadgets and embraced social media, but we haven't invested
in technology funds.

The bursting of the technology bubble in 2000 was blamed for scaring a generation of investors away from the stock market forever. It's not difficult to see why.

A far-sighted investor who had put £1,000 in the Aberdeen Technology fund at launch in 1982 (admittedly, there would not have been many) would have been sitting on £36,000 by mid-1999.

Few investors could resist such mouth-watering figures. That particular fund was raking in more money in a week during the 2000 Isa season than it had done in 20 years.

Investors who piled in trying to make a fast buck on the technological revolution at the beginning of the Millennium will now be nursing losses of around 40pc, irrespective of which technology fund they invested in.

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Last week the Investment Management Association showed me the annual sales figures for technology funds over the past two decades.

In fact, technology funds first came on the scene in the early Eighties, when Amstrad and IBM started to make waves and when the closest thing to a Sony PlayStation was Sinclair's ZX Spectrum.

Needless to say, there was more money being withdrawn from technology funds than going in the years running up to the Nineties technology boom. It was only as share prices reached their giddy heights that the masses joined in. Technology funds raked in a bumper £2.4bn in 2000 (most of which came in the first three months of that year).

For the best part of the past decade, investors have shunned technology – even though they have been busy replacing their CDs with iPods, swapping clunky PCs for sleek laptops and catching up with old friends on social networks.

They may have missed a trick. The IMA figures show that between 2000 and 2008 investors were net sellers of technology funds.

Yet the few remaining tech funds (many closed or merged after the fallout) have experienced some significant gains over the past few years. If you had invested in Axa Framlington Global Technology as recently as three years ago, you would have doubled your money. If you had invested in 2007, you would have seen returns of around 80pc.

There will be many investors who will regret not buying into the likes of Apple and Google – two companies that have defined the way many of us live our lives today. As I write this on my MacBook on a London-bound train, hooked up to the web via a dongle, listening to my iPod, it seems ridiculous that we ever doubted that technology would take hold.

In a month or so, Facebook, another definitive technology giant, is expected to float on the US stock market. It is bound to whet the appetite of many new investors and perhaps even spark interest from investors who got their fingers burned the last time around.

I'm not suggesting that we are heading for another bubble simply because of Facebook's flotation hype, but investors might want to take a look at the graph (left) before deciding that the time is ripe to invest in tech.

Perhaps the easy money from the technology we have embraced over the past five years has already been made.